Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking

8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018




School Years:

Hawking began his schooling at the Byron House School in Highgate, London. He later blamed its “progressive methods” for his failure to learn to read while at the school. In St Albans, the eight-year-old Hawking attended St Albans High School for Girls for a few months. At that time, younger boys could attend one of the houses.

Hawking attended Radlett School, an independent school in the village of Radlett in Hertfordshire, for a year, and from September 1952, St Albans School, an independent school in the city of St Albans in Hertfordshire after Hawking passed the eleven-plus a year early. The family placed a high value on education. Hawking’s father wanted his son to attend the well-regarded Westminster School, but the 13-year-old Hawking was ill on the day of the scholarship examination. His family could not afford the school fees without the financial aid of a scholarship, so Hawking remained at St Albans. A positive consequence was that Hawking remained with a close group of friends with whom he enjoyed board games, the manufacture of fireworks, model aeroplanes and boats, and long discussions about Christianity and extrasensory perception. From 1958 on, with the help of the mathematics teacher Dikran Tahta, they built a computer from clock parts, an old telephone switchboard and other recycled components.

Although known at school as “Einstein”, Hawking was not initially successful academically. With time, he began to show considerable aptitude for scientific subjects and, inspired by Tahta, decided to read mathematics at university. Hawking’s father advised him to study medicine, concerned that there were few jobs for mathematics graduates. He also wanted his son to attend University College, Oxford, his own alma mater. As it was not possible to read mathematics there at the time, Hawking decided to study physics and chemistry. Despite his headmaster’s advice to wait until the next year, Hawking was awarded a scholarship after taking the examinations in March 1959.


Hawking had a rare early-onset slow-progressing form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as motor neurone disease or Lou Gehrig’s disease, that gradually paralysed him over the decades.


In the late 1960s, Hawking’s physical abilities declined: he began to use crutches and ceased lecturing regularly. As he slowly lost the ability to write, he developed compensatory visual methods, including seeing equations in terms of geometry. The physicist Werner Israel later compared the achievements to Mozart composing an entire symphony in his head. Hawking was, however, fiercely independent and unwilling to accept help or make concessions for his disabilities. He preferred to be regarded as “a scientist first, popular science writer second, and, in all the ways that matter, a normal human being with the same desires, drives, dreams, and ambitions as the next person.” His wife, Jane Hawking, later noted: “Some people would call it determination, some obstinacy. I’ve called it both at one time or another.” He required much persuasion to accept the use of a wheelchair at the end of the 1960s, but ultimately became notorious for the wildness of his wheelchair driving. Hawking was a popular and witty colleague, but his illness, as well as his reputation for brashness, distanced him from some.


For his communication, Hawking initially raised his eyebrows to choose letters on a spelling card. But in 1986 he received a computer program called the “Equalizer” from Walter Woltosz, CEO of Words Plus, who had developed an earlier version of the software to help his mother-in-law, who also suffered from ALS and had lost her ability to speak and write. In a method he uses to this day, Hawking could now simply press a switch to select phrases, words or letters from a bank of about 2,500–3,000 that are scanned. The program was originally run on a desktop computer. However, Elaine Mason’s husband, David, a computer engineer, adapted a small computer and attached it to his wheelchair. Released from the need to use somebody to interpret his speech, Hawking commented that “I can communicate better now than before I lost my voice.” The voice he uses has an American accent and is no longer produced. Despite the availability of other voices, Hawking has retained this original voice, saying that he prefers it and identifies with it. At this point, Hawking activated a switch using his hand and could produce up to 15 words a minute. Lectures were prepared in advance and were sent to the speech synthesiser in short sections to be delivered.

Hawking gradually lost the use of his hand, and in 2005 he began to control his communication device with movements of his cheek muscles, with a rate of about one word per minute. With this decline there is a risk of his developing locked-in syndrome, so Hawking collaborated with Intel researchers on systems that could translate his brain patterns or facial expressions into switch activations. After several prototypes that did not perform as planned, they finally settled on an adaptive word predictor made by the London-based start-up SwiftKey, which used a system similar to his original technology, so Hawking could adapt to it easier than a brand new complex system, and after inputting large amounts of Hawking’s papers and other written materials, developed a satisfactory system that saves time by predicting words and phrases he uses frequently, similar to typing software used on most smartphones today. By 2009 he could no longer drive his wheelchair independently, but the same people who created his new typing mechanics are working on a method to drive his chair using movements made by his chin. This has proven difficult, since Hawking cannot move his neck, and trials have shown that while he can indeed drive the chair, the movement is sporadic and jumpy. He is experiencing increased breathing difficulties, requiring a ventilator at times, and has been hospitalised several times.


Information sourced from wikepedia

Hawking Facts:

  • Hawking has made many important contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity. He is also well known for his bestselling book ‘A Brief History of Time’.
  • Helped by the success of his book ‘A Brief History of Time’, Hawking has released other books aimed at making his work accessible to a wide range of people, these include ‘The Universe in a Nutshell’, ‘A Briefer History of Time’ and ‘George’s Secret Key to the Universe’, a children’s book with a strong focus on science.
  • Hawking has worked extensively on the subject of black holes, providing theories for their behavior, including the idea that they emit radiation.
  • Hawking suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a type of motor neuron disease that has left him almost completely paralyzed.
  • Some of the awards Hawking has received for his work include the 1979 Albert Einstein Medal, the Order of the British Empire (Commander) in 1982 and the 1988 Wolf Prize in Physics.
  • Famous Stephen Hawking quotes include: “There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of the universe and what can be more special than that there is no boundary?”
  • “I don’t believe that the ultimate theory will come by steady work along existing lines. We need something new. We can’t predict what that will be or when we will find it because if we knew that, we would have found it already!”